road.
‘What’s up?’ Ty asked.
Lock looked towards the crosses stony-faced but said nothing. ‘Just want to take a look.’
Ty pumped the brakes and the car slid to a halt on the gravel.
Lock got out and walked towards the base of the first cross. A photograph, wrapped in clear plastic, was fastened to it. He hunkered down in the dust and studied it.
A young Mexican woman looked back at him. She had long dark hair, soft brown eyes, and the hesitant self- aware smile of someone unused to posing for the camera. She was wearing a black high-school graduation gown over her clothes and clutching a mortarboard in her right hand, her whole life ahead of her. At the bottom of the photograph was a name: Rosa Perez. Beneath that, in the same neat handwriting, were the dates of her birth and death. Rosa had been nineteen when she died.
Lock straightened up and, shielding his eyes from the strengthening mid-morning sun, took in the vista below. Santa Maria lay before him. Official estimates put its population at 1.5 million but that was almost certainly out by at least half a million. Like the other border cities along the Rio Grande, the city had drawn in hundreds of thousands of people from the poorer south of the country to work in its maquiladoras. Free trade between the countries had allowed American companies to shift jobs a few miles across the border and save themselves tens of millions of dollars in lower wage costs and taxes.
The workers in the maquiladoras were mostly young women. They were considered more dextrous when it came to the assembly line, and the factory owners could pay them less than they would men. They were also the ones who had been turning up dead for more than a decade. Thousands of them, spirited off the streets, raped, murdered and dumped, often mutilated or dismembered, like trash, all over the city.
The roadside crosses were one part memorial and one part caution. No one in Santa Maria was safe from the ravages of a crime rate that had made it the most dangerous city in the world. But young poor women were the most at risk. It was the same the world over, but here, in Mexico, it had taken on new depths of depravity. Worst of all, no one knew who was behind it. There were theories and whispers, but no answers. Only more killings.
Lock reached out to touch the picture of the girl and his mind forced him back to Melissa. He rose, packing away his feelings. He and Ty had a job to do. A job that wouldn’t afford them any distractions. There would be time to mourn the dead when they were done. First they had to find Mendez.
He walked back to the car, opened the trunk and pulled out two large black canvas duffel bags. Staying on the roadside and shielded by the car, he deposited the first bag, marked with a red and white tag, on the back seat. He dropped the second bag, which had no tag, next to it. It was the second that he unzipped. He pulled two hard plastic black gun cases and two side holsters from it.
He opened the first and took out a SIG Sauer 226. He clicked a fresh twelve-round clip into it and checked it over. He repeated the same procedure with the second 226. Then he closed the cases, zipped up the bag, shut the rear door and got back into the front passenger seat.
The guns had been purchased from a contact Ty had in El Paso, a dealer who didn’t care whom he sold to as long as the money was good. No paperwork had changed hands, aside from a thick bundle of twenty-dollar bills. If they had to use them, the only way the weapons would be traced back to them was if they left their fingerprints on them. On the other hand, to venture into Mexico looking for Mendez unarmed would have been guaranteed suicide.
The most nerve-racking part had been passing through Customs Control on the US side of the border. Tourists generally didn’t use the US/Santa Maria crossing because of what lay on the Mexican side. But gun runners did, although not usually in regular cars. Illegal traffic across the border was a two-way process. Drugs went north, and firearms went south to the cartels.
When they had been questioned, Lock had shown two carry permits and informed the guard that they were private security contractors going south to guard a fictional American executive and his family, who were living in Santa Maria. As cover stories went, it was plenty plausible and they had been waved through.
He handed the second weapon to Ty, who checked it over, put on the holster and slid the gun into it. ‘What happens if we get pulled over by the Federales?’ Ty asked.
Lock stared hard into the glare of the sun. ‘We do what everyone else does. We pay ’em off.’
Ty grimaced. ‘And if they won’t be bought?’
‘What colour do you think we should get our crosses?’ Lock asked.
‘Well, not pink, that’s for damn sure.’
Lock glanced back at the roadside and forced a smile. ‘I dunno… pink might bring out your eyes.’
Ty waited for a gap in the traffic and pulled back on to the highway as a truck roared past them in the fast lane. As he drove, his eyes flicked back and forth from the road ahead to the rear-view and side mirrors. They were relatively safe on the freeway, but in a moment they would be on surface streets until they reached their first port of call.
Ty nudged his way through the thundering lines of trucks, returning home to pick up fresh loads, towards the off-ramp. He kept the turn signal off. He waited until he was almost at the final stretch of the median, where the ramp ended, then spun the wheel hard right. He gave the rear-view mirror a final check to see if anyone had followed but the ramp behind was clear.
Lock checked the sat-nav app on his cell phone. ‘Okay, right at the bottom,’ he said to Ty.
Ty didn’t signal this time either, and again waited until the last possible moment before making the turn, swinging out wide and almost clipping a green and white taxi cab travelling in the opposite direction. The road opened up into a wide boulevard, with a concrete median running down the middle.
‘Over here,’ said Lock, and they pulled into a second-hand-car dealership with an auto-repair body shop on one side, presumably operated by the same owner, and a dentist on the other. The body repair and the dealership were two halves of the same business. The place was a yonque, or chop shop. They were known as bone-yards, or huesarios, in the interior of the country.
Ty pulled the car through a set of gates into a small yard shielded by panels of corrugated iron. A dog sat scratching itself next to a dark blue Dodge Durango with the deep tint on the windows that seemed standard here, rather than a factory option. The dog rose slowly, took a piss against one of the tyres and ambled away as Lock went to greet the owner, a portly man wearing a flowery shirt that was two sizes too small, and a fedora.
Lock pointed to the Durango. ‘ Cuanto cuesta? ’ he said to the dealer. How much?
The man took off his fedora and stared at Lock with a bemused smile. The Durango had probably been an insurance write-off, bought at an auction in Texas, repaired in the chop shop, the plates changed to Mexican ones and put up for sale. The car Lock was driving was a white Ford Ranger, worth perhaps ten times what the Durango would fetch. That was the exact reason they couldn’t ride around in it. At best they would stand out a mile. At worst they were risking a car jacking, which would be messy. Lock knew that in order to move around they had to do their best to blend in, which, given their colouring, was hardly going to be easy.
The dealer shrugged and walked over to the Durango, no doubt extolling its virtues and leaving behind Lock’s scant grasp of Spanish as he did so. Finally, eager to keep the exchange as short as possible, Lock dug into his pocket and pulled out a thousand dollars in cash. ‘You give me the keys now, I give you the cash, and we leave,’ he said in English, gesturing to the gate.
The man disappeared inside his little wooden shack of an office and reappeared a moment later with a set of car keys. Lock took them and tossed them to Ty. ‘Take it for a spin round the block. I’ll wait here.’
Less than five minutes later, Ty was back. He climbed out of the driver’s seat. ‘It’s a bucket, but it’ll do.’
Lock handed the money to the man, who stuck it quickly inside the lining of his hat, still not quite believing his good luck. Ty took the Durango, and Lock the Ford Ranger, and they drove in convoy out through the gates and on to the road. A half-mile further on, Ty pulled into the multi-storey parking lot of a small shopping mall. They both took a ticket at the barrier, drove past the armed private security guard at the entrance and up on to the roof.
While the lower levels had been crowded, the roof was quiet. Lock scoped the area for cameras but there were none. In a city where violence was explicit and wanton, and where your identity decided whether you would be arrested or face the courts, closed-circuit security systems were hardly a deterrent.
With the Ranger and the Durango next to each other, they moved their gear into the Durango. They pulled two more black canvas bags from the back of the Ranger and placed them in the rear compartment of the Durango. They drove back down a few levels. Lock parked the Ranger, got into the Durango next to Ty and they left the parking lot.
